So, you bought a bunch of domains with the intention of eventually building websites. How do you decide which to build, which to park, which to redirect, etc.? That depends on what you’ve got in your portfolio. If you can group domains together by niche and further group by domains that are related to those domains, you can come up with a plan that not only identifies the best website potential, but those domains that will help to support them.
Website Potential :
Let’s say you own 5 domains that are related. The first thing you will want to look at for each of these 5 is the search volume for the keywords they contain. If you have a clear cut winner, that’s your website. If not, which domain will be most popular with your eventual visitors? If one is a .com, that’s the clear choice. Domains that have misspellings, dashes and numerals will be less memorable, so put them further down the list.
Once you’ve identified which domain you want to develop into a website, you might have others that are related that can be useful for sending traffic, sending link juice, redirecting to the website or to hold on to for a different aspect of the business.
Support :
For SEO purposes, if the domains reside on different servers and IP addresses, the incoming links from the ones you build will be more effective.
Keeping the content completely unique from the website, a blog that exists to serve up quality will become a good supporting back link. This will not be an effective tactic if every blog post is linking back to your website. The blog should be able to stand on its own as a quality blog, serving up more than articles (include photos, videos, etc. as you would for your main website).
Redirecting :
Redirecting can be effective when the redirected domain receives a decent amount of type-in traffic. It will not, however, be a domain that will rank on its own or be found in search. It can pass on any link juice from back links it received in the past. It is, however, important that the domain be related to the domain it is redirecting to; otherwise the tactic comes across as spammy.
Parking :
If some of the domains in this selected group are parked and you plan to use them, do be sure to change the parked page to an “under construction” page 6-8 weeks before you make the site live. It will take that long for the search engine spiders to figure out the page is no longer parked and having a parked page right before it launches will only delay its being crawled. If you have no intentions of using a domain for the time being, you’re better off parking a domain to earn income from pay-per-click ads until you figure out what you want to do with it.
If you do not already own other domains and do want to create blogs or mini-sites to support your website, you can discover related available domains simply by plugging in a list of keywords related to your niche into a domain search tool at any domain listing website. What’s important to remember when implementing these tactics is that an effort will need to be made for each developed domain; otherwise you will only be building your own spam back links.
